RF Generation

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RF Generation
URL http://www.rfgeneration.com/
Slogan "Put it on channel 3"
Commercial? No
Type of site Gaming
Registration Optional
Available language(s) English
Created by Laurel Settee, Michael Collins, Mark Hartholt, Eddie Herrmann, Mike Leon, and Rick Kuethe[1]
Launched June 8, 2004

RF Generation is a video gaming website that collects information, images and statistics related to video games and video game hardware both past and present. Games and hardware developed in every region around the world are featured for the public to view, track and search for information. The website's purpose is to allow registered members to display their collection, trade, buy and sell with other members and ask for advice and expertise from highly knowledgeable staff, collectors and gamers from around the world. Registration is free and so are all of the services and features the site has to offer and is available to anyone with an interest in gaming.

Currently RF Generation has over 137 different sections in the database covering games and hardware ranging everything from the Magnavox Odyssey from 1972 to Nintendo's Wii and other new video game systems currently on the market as well as classic and modern computers and handheld devices.

As of March 19, 2008, the site contains within its database approximately:

Member and staff submissions for new game additions, hardware additions, variations of existing entries as well as filling in information and images are automated using pre-made scripts for convenience and uniformity allowing fast implementation into the database as well as ease of use for everyone.

Among the many features that RFGen offers video gamers and collectors alike are:

  • Forums for discussion, commerce, pursuit of knowledge and friendly chatter.
  • A weekly live chat for registered members to discuss the poll of the week, gaming news and to meet other gamers and collectors from all walks of life and from around the world.
  • Daily front page content and RSS feeds including weekly featured games, blog entries, gaming news, site announcements and current database statistics.
  • Browser based arcade with over 150 games including classics like Tetris, Pac-man and many more. As part of that there's a sub section of the forum dedicated to challenging other players and post high scores for both the browser arcade and gaming systems of all types.
  • Collection tools for members to track both their games and hardware, trade with others, make notes and display their games publicly with 5 meg of space for pictures to showcase their collection as well.
  • System checklists are available in PDF format to supplement these tools by offering a way to view and print lists based on a member's ownership and as complete lists of each system's game library.
  • FAQs to help new members easily use all of the site's features and scripts and a full team of staff to answer any questions they may have or suggestions they'd like to share.
  • Links to friendly websites, video game resources and affiliates as well as banners for use in both RF Generation's forum and others that both promote the site, and show off a member's collection in their signature.
  • Personal blogs to allow members to journal their hobbies, interests and personal commentary both gaming and non-gaming related.

Contents

[edit] History

RF Generation was founded on April 28, 2004, by Michael Collins, Mark Hartholt, Eddie Herrmann and Laurel Settee -- some of whom were former staff members of the now-defunct Video Game Bible. A very important part of the site's founding belief was making sure that everyone and anyone who helped was properly thanked and credited for anything they contributed.

On the morning of June 8, 2004 the website was officially announced and became accessible to the public. Some items were still being worked on at the time, but the message boards were set up for users to access. A few hours later a temporary version of the rest of the website was uploaded. This was to fill the gap while the framework for the database was being edited.

June 9, 2004 Tyler Dorval, aka Odonadon, joined the RF Gen Staff. He left his position on the Staff at a later and currently unknown date.

June 17, 2004 Dennis Gruchala, aka Den68, joined the RF Gen Staff.

June 24, 2004 The ability to attach files to your posts was added to the message boards. The maximum allowed file size was originally 600KB. This was later dropped to 350 kB.

Members who were lucky enough to be on the website at 1:45 on the morning of July 1, 2004 would have been the first to see the unveiling of the RF Gen collection tool by Eddie Herrmann. It worked in conjunction with the already existing database of 5,000+ game titles. Members were, for the first time, able to list their games online to keep track of them. Users were also given the ability to rate games on a scale of 0 to 100.

August 8, 2004 a new script allowing members of the website to submit missing information for game pages was added. This allowed non-staff members to more easily submit information about a game; such as release date, genre, publisher, and developer, as well as overviews, reviews, and game trivia. Since its inception, thousands of games have been updated thanks to the efforts of many members.

August 19, 2004 Anthony Terzi, aka Izret101, joined the RF Gen staff.

September 20, 2004 Advanced Postings Statistics where added to member profiles. Giving you the ability to see how many topics you or other members have started, total posts, and graphs of these over a period of 14 days, 14 Weeks or one year. These results could either be dynamic, showing a graph that would go up or down depending on how often you posted, or accumulative, which shows a constantly increasing graph.

September 24, 2004 Mark Hartholt, aka Arrrhalomynn, left the RF Gen staff for the first time.

September 30, 2004 was the start of the first server change for the website. The old server was experiencing too many problems and was having excessive amounts of downtime. Luckily, these service dropouts were for the most part early in the morning eastern standard time. Hence, they mostly affected European users. Six days later the website had been fully transferred to the new servers. There was a short downtime on October 5 due to the transfer, but aside from that everything else had gone smoothly.

October 11, 2004 Kyle Niday, aka freak_boy, joined the RF Gen Staff.

October 12, 2004 Mark Hartholt returned to the RF Gen Staff.

November 28, 2004 Scott Williams, aka Tynstar, joined the RF Gen Staff.

December 2, 2004 RF Gen had its 100th registered member.

December 22, 2004 The member only known as sharp was added to the RF Gen Staff.

On January 3, 2005 there was a new addition to the collection tool, Collection Profiles. Users were given the ability to write a description about their collection as well as upload 3 MB worth of pictures to showcase it. On the top of each person's profile page was their description. Below that were their stats, which was very versatile and allowed people to see percentages of games owned across consoles, regions, genres, release years, and publishers. Lastly, below the stats were any photos of that member's collection that they had uploaded.

January 31, 2005 The first System Checklists were uploaded to the website. There were 68 PDF lists available at this launch all of which were for the most complete NTSC consoles listed in the database.

February 7, 2005 The second volley of System Checklists were available on the website. These where for the Brazilian, NTSC-J, PAL regions.

February 18, 2005 Another new feature was added to the site. On the main page of the website a section for a Featured Game was added. The first game showcased was Tales of Symphonia.

Five days later on February 23 the main page received a few more new additions to make updates and changes to the website visible as they were happening. These new features were the Updated Games, Updated Collections, and New Images sections. They appeared in that order on the right side of the page below the Featured Game. Updated Games displayed the last 5 updated game pages and the games' titles were linked to their respective game pages. Updated Collections was similar, but instead it linked you to the users' respective collections. Updated Images linked to the game page just like the Updated Games would, since the game page is where one can choose to view any scans or screenshots of a particular game.

March 18, 2005 Rick Johnson, aka captain_nintendo, gained his position among the RF Gen Staff.

April Fool's Day of 2005 came as a surprise to quite a few members of the RF Generation community. Whenever anyone tried to visit the website they would be redirected to Composite Generation. There was a new set of message board rules written up, and all systems that use RF switches were excluded from the database. Only three of the site members even knew about the prank, Michael Collins (who's username at the time was Reverend Nepenthean), Eddie Herrmann (St0rmTK421) and David Murnan (TraderJake). Therefore, it was a surprise even to staff members. Some people had been truly fooled by it and did not realize it was a joke until it had been more or less pointed out by those on the new forums. Arguably one of the funniest things about the day was not known until April 6 when Michael Collins, the webmaster at the time, received an email from a website that sold various kinds of cables. The email stated that they had put a link to Composite Generation on their website under the Composite Cables section and hoped that the favor would be returned. Stating that it had "...some really good stuff related to my site's topic of cables and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great aspects of cables that I'd like to give my visitors more information about."

April 6 was also the debut of the RF Gen Top 100 games. All games in the database with 3 or more votes would be put into the running for the Top 100 list.

On April 21 due to the great volume of members posting scans on the message board or sending scans via email to staff members, a new script was added to allow normal members to submit images. These images would then be reviewed by a staff member to assure the quality of the scan and subsequently added to the database.

April 28, 2005 was the release date of two Mozilla Firefox plugins. One for searching the database for gamepages, and another for doing an image search in the database. Both of these can still be downloaded at the bottom of the RFGen homepage, www.rfgeneration.com.

May 24, 2005 Pieter Verhallen, aka Speedy_NES, became a Staff member.

June 1, 2005 Tony Holly, aka tholly, joined the RF Gen Staff.

On June 8, 2005 RF Generation celebrated its one year anniversary. In one year's time, the database had grown to include over 18,000 games and over 17,000 images. To celebrate the one year anniversary, RF Gen held a "Birthday Blowout Contest." Mike Collins supplied a photo of himself wearing a Tiger R-Zone and in order to enter yourself into the contest, you had to supply an edited version of the picture. The winner of the contest was to receive the Tiger R-Zone that was pictured, games (to be announced), an official RF Generation baseball cap, and a one-year subscription to the gaming magazine of their choice.

The ability for the addition of software variations was also added on this day. This allowed for Greatest Hits, Platinum Hits, Player's Choice and other similar titles to be added to the database.

On top of all of that, RF Generation also had its 200th member register.

July 11, 2005 TraderJake was announced the winner of the first Birthday Blowout Contest. His photoshopped work of art entitled "R-Zone's Secret" narrowly beat Danvx6's "R-ZoneThinker" by one vote and The Evil Leon's "Tian Men Mike" by two votes.

September 26, 2005 RFGen had its 300th registered member.

September 27, 2005 RF Generation experienced its second server problem. It had 'filled' the server space, and items were being deleted from the message boards. Within a few hours, the problem had been isolated and the deleted items restored, possibly the two most important items that were restored were the accounts of Anthony Terzi (izret101) and Zac Saxton (CatchFiveBats).

December 12, 2005 Anthony Terzi set up and began work on the RF Gen MySpace.

December 18, 2005 The RF Gen MySpace was released to the public.

January 3, 2006 RF Generation had to switch servers for the second time. This time it was due to the host breaking their service. Stating that YaBB.pl, the script that the message boards ran on, was not allowed to run on their servers. It had never been mentioned previous to this occasion, however, and was not stated anywhere in the contractual agreement. Unfortunately, the message boards were down while a new host was being found. The remainder of the website remained online and accessible.

January 6-7 2006 RF Generation was back online and fully functional sometime between 11:30 p.m. on the 6th and 12:30 a.m. on the 7th.

February 1, 2006 The RF Gen community experienced its first great loss when the first members learned that Michael Collins had died. The RF Gen community did its best to comfort those who knew him best by sending out prayers and apologies. The relative message board thread was viewed and commented in by members of his family, members of the website, as well as members from other websites where Mike was known. In an effort to honor Mike and keep him in their memories, "R.I.P. Michael 'Nepenthean' Collins. You will not be forgotten." was added to many users' signatures. Some members later replaced it with a commmorative banner/signature created by Dennis Gruchala.

February 24, 2006 Mark Hartholt left the RF Gen Staff for the second time.

March 31, 2006 RF Gen's 500th member registered.

April 28, 2006 RF Generation celebrated its second birthday. This time on the actual day of its creation rather than the day it was made widely available to the general public. This years contest, called "The Terrible Two Contest", was for the most unlikely scene in a videogame. The example used was Mario running through Hyrule.

Also an RF Gen IE Toolbar was released to the public. The toolbar enables users to access the message boards, perform both image and data searches of the database with all the same criteria available on the search page, submit both info and images. It also allowed for direct access to all personal collection tools and all of the "features" of the site, top 100 games, bottom 25 games, etc.

May 2, 2006 A day later than planned the first official month long contest was set into action by Izret101. After an initial vote on what games to play there had to be a runoff vote due to a tie. After the second round of voting Tetris for the NES was decided. More specifically it was the licensed version of Tetris Game Type A.

June 27, 2006 Andrew Carr aka AndyC joins the RF Gen staff as an Editor

June 28, 2006 Ken Wozetek aka Mezmoron joins the staff as an Editor.

August 4, 2006 Chris Vanderhoef aka Shaggy joins the staff.

August 30, 2006 The RFGeneration community grows to over 800 members all using the many services and tools the website has to offer.

October 15, 2006 RFGeneration.com switchs from a file-based database to one using mySQL to help ease server load from its increased web traffic. It also marks a change from using a YaBB based forum to one based on SMF.

October 20, 2006 Brian Dick aka Bum-Man joins the RF Gen staff.

November 13, 2006 RFGeneration's community passes 900 members.

November 16, 2006 Staff pages are added to the website to show those responsible for building and maintaining RFGeneration.com as well as adding a personal touch to show those who work hard in helping it grow and in turn thank them for it.

January 8, 2007 A weekly chat is started on Monday's where members discuss topics concerning gaming based on the poll of the week. The poll of the week and the weekly chat are both chosen and hosted by RF Gen staff member Chris Vanderhoef aka Shaggy.

January 14, 2007 As RFGeneration grows so does the need for more staff. After careful consideration by the Editors and Administrators of submitted applications by members, six new staff posiions were granted. Members Ken Allgood aka Pop Culture Portal, Clint Renfro aka Fuyukaze, Ryan Thompson aka s1lence, Josh Beard aka JWKobayashi, Keith Brown aka Tan and also Mr. Mysterious aka Shimra joined the staff of RF Gen as writers and contributors for both the website portion of RFGeneration and its database.

February 1, 2007 A memorial was unveiled on RFGeneration.com to honor Michael Collins.

The memorial includes reflections from friends and colleagues as well as a picture montage with a heading that says "In memory of Michael Collins. You will not be forgotten." which is a tip of the hat to one of his personal tenets that "No one here should be forgotten.". A tenet that the staff and members of RFGeneration believe strongly and follow to this day.

February 5, 2007 RFGeneration celebrates the addition of the 1000th member to its growing community of gamers in just 3 years.

February 24, 2007 Due to an idea by RFGen member "Deviance", a new feature was added to the "All Collections" page. Members and guests alike can now sort through collections by hardware and software and view them separately.

March 4, 2007 A banner generator made by David Murnan aka TraderJake was introduced which allows members to generate a signature banner that has their personal collection stats for the games database listed for use on forums.

April 1, 2007 For April Fool's day 2007 RF Generation became "Toddler Generation". The front page became vibrant with Crayola type pastel colours and the theme reflected gamers of a younger variety. As well special forums were made for posts relating to the theme and games from such series as Sesame Street and Fisher Price.

April 19, 2007 Keith Brown aka "Tan" is promoted from Staff to RF Generation's Front Page Editor.

April 28, 2007 RF Generation celebrates its third anniversary and opens a contest called “Show Us You Love RF Generation!”. Members will submit entries in any form they choose that shows how much they love RF Generation. After the voting is finished the winner will receive a magazine subscription and a game of their choice.

May 26, 2007 Terry Herman aka "marriott_guy" joins the staff of RF Generation as a Hardware Contributor adding his considerable knowledge of unique and obscure video game systems to the community. Also RF Generation member "Belgarath" joins the staff as a European Contributor providing both hardware and software expertise.

June 8, 2007 RF Generation unveils its site re-design. A project months in planning, preparation and work, RFGEN 2.0 as it's called opens to the public. The re-design includes new format for the game/hardware pages, a new nav bar, new site logo as well as a newspost/blog style front page and several new features. Changes and add-ons that greatly improve both the look and function of the site for its members and visitors alike.

June 17, 2007 Tony Bowe aka Tondog joins the RF Generation staff as a blog writer/news writer for RFGen's new front page.

July 7, 2007 New staff members Wout De Ruyck aka Magewout, Ben Wilkinson aka Oatbob and also members "Apolloboy" and "Funk_Buddy" join the RFGen team filling positions as European Contributor, Feature Writer, Hardware Contributor and Japanese Contributor respectively.

July 8, 2007 RF Generations's Site Director David Murnan adds a new and improved version of the system checklists to the site. These new lists can be printed or viewed both as plain lists and also filled in with member collection information (quantity, box and manual).

August 10, 2007 The Site Director David Murnan unveils community blogs for member use. This allows RF Generation registered members to have their own customized blog for personal use and gives the Blog Editor the ability to showcase member content on the front page as well.

November 17, 2007 The RF Generation store opens to the public. It's purpose is to sell RFGen branded merchandise and use the profits to help fund the website's server costs.

December 12, 2007 Ben Wilkinson (Oatbob) is promoted to Hardware Editor and Keith Brown (Tan) is made an Administrator.

December 19, 2007 RFGen officially welcomes member Elijah Simpson (shadowforte) to the staff as a writer.

[edit] Database history

June 12, 2004 Atari XEGS, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Sega Game Gear, Magnavox Odyssey, IBM PC Jr., PlayStation, Watara Supervision, Coleco Telstar Arcade, TI-99/4A, TRS-80, Nintendo Game & Watch consoles where all added to the RF Gen database with help from Joe Santulli who shared some of those lists from his own database.

August 26, 2004 The database surpassed the 6,000 image mark. This included scans and screenshots.

September 24, 2004 In less than one month another 1,000+ images had been added to the database. The 7,000 image mark was passed on this day.

October 3, 2004 With the addition of 37 scans for the various Game Boy systems the database had reached exactly 3000 scans. A few hours earlier the video game console XaviX was added to the database with all three of its released titles.

October 11, 2004 Two image milestones were passed side by side on this day, 5,000 screenshots and 8,000 total images.

October 13, 2004 The N-Gage was added to the database.

November 25, 2004 The database surpassed 14,000 titles.

November 26, 2004 The database passed the 6,000 screenshots mark.

December 4, 2004 10,000 images were reached after the addition of 300 NES screenshots.

December 6, 2004 The Nintendo DS was added to the database.

December 16, 2004 The Nintendo e-Reader and Pokémon mini was added to the database.

December 21, 2004 This day saw the break of the 15,000 total game pages.

December 22, 2004 The Tapwave Zodiac and Tiger Gizmondo were both added to the database.

December 23, 2004 The MegaDuck and Cougar Boy were both added to the database with all their releases thanks to RF Gen member renelips.

January 4, 2005 Over 7,000 total screenshots were in the database. This was the fifth month in a row that 1,000 screenshots had been added.

January 8, 2005 The 16,000 game mark was overtaken. In just three short weeks, 100 new titles had been added to the database.

February 1, 2005 The PSP was added to the database.

February 9, 2005 After nearly 4 months, another 100 scans had been added to the database. 4,000 scans had finally been acrewed.

February 11, 2005 Two more consoles where added. The only GameMaster, which was only released in Europe, and the Nintendo iQue, which was only released in China.

February 25, 2005 The website passed the 12,000 image mark and was at exactly 12,100 images.

February 26, 2005 The 17,000 game mark was passed.

February 27, 2005 The total number of screenshots in the database passed 8,000.

March 5, 2005 The Bandai SuFami Turbo and the Bandia Playdia. All 13 games released for the SuFami Turbo were also added.

March 14, 2005 The Sharp X68000, BIT Corporation Gamate and ColorVision were all added to the database. Also all of the games released for the ColorVision were added to the database.

March 30, 2005 The total number of screenshots grew anouth thousand plus and passed 9,000.

April 10, 2005 Two new consoles where added to the database. The Philips Tele-spiel ES-2201 and the Interton Video 2000.

April 12, 2005 Another new console was added to the database. It was the Mattel Children's Discovery System.

April 22, 2005 The 5,000 unique scans mark was passed, and completely eclipsed three days later by the addition of 500 more scans.

April 26, 2005 The NEC PC-FX as well as all of its released games were added to the database.

May 22, 2005 The Sega 32X achieved a complete set of scans. This means the front and back of the box, the manual, and the cartridge could be viewed for every Sega 32X game in the database.

May 31, 2005 The database passed 7,000 scans.

June 4, 2005 Scans of the Nintendo World Championship 1990 cart for NES were uploaded. The scans of, and a ton of information for, this extremely rare NES game were supplied by Ben Smith. The same cartridge sold, shortly before we received the scans, for $1,975 on eBay.

September 23, 2005 The Commodore Amiga was added to the database.

September 29, 2005 The GamePark GP32 was added to the database.

October 11, 2005 10,000 scans were reached and surpassed.

November 8, 2005 Four new consoles were added to the database they were: EPOCH Cassette Vision, Bandai TV Jack Super Vision 8000, Entex Select-A-Game Machine and the Exidy Sorcerer.

November 10, 2005 Ohio Arts Etch-A-Sketch Animator 2000 and the EACA EG2000 Colour Genie were both added to the database.

November 15, 2005 The Magnavox Odyssey² had the last game in its library, Atlantis, scanned. Every game for this system has a complete set of scans in the RF Gen database.

November 23, 2005 The total number of games in the database passed 20,000. The Xbox 360 was also added to the database.

March 6, 2006 The Amstrad CPC 464 was added to the database.

March 9, 2006 In the late hours of the night the MSX was added to the database.

March 10, 2006 In the early hours of the morning the Epoch Game Pocket Computer was added to the database as well as a list of its released titles.

March 20, 2006 The 21,000th video game was added to the database.

April 12, 2006 The database passed 12,000 screenshots.

June 14, 2006 The RF Generation game database passes 22,000 games with the addition of Mega Man Battle Network 6 Cybeast Gregar for the Game Boy Advance.

September 8, 2006 Hardware Scripts Version 0.5 is released. Among its many features, most notably are regional variation support for PAL variations, image support to showcase the packaging, manuals, and the hardware itself and the logging of contributions, which gives credit to the member who submits information and/or images for a particular item.

September 20, 2006 Hardware Scripts Version 0.8 is released. With the latest updated release came the ability for the members to begin adding regional variations, images, dates, title additions and other important information to the hardware database. It also became a testbed for a new game submission script to be added later which allowed members to submit game releases not currently listed in the game database.

October 15, 2006 All of the databases (Collections, Games, Hardware) were implemented into the new mySQL server. Also the Hardware Script is finalized allowing members to add hardware entries into their personal collection lists.

December 5, 2006 The game database grows to over 25,000 games and 28,500 images.

December 30, 2006 Ken Wozetek aka Mezmoron and his wife add over 400 scans to the Nintendo DS's U.S. database which goes a long way to make RF Gen one of the internet's largest resources of information on Nintendo's latest handheld system.

January 6, 2007 The RF Generation database passes 30,000 images which includes game scans as well as screenshots, all in the span of two and a half years. That averages to approximately 1000 new images added on a monthly basis or 33 per day.

January 19, 2007 RF Generation passes 32,000 images in its database.

January 26, 2007 The database passes 33,000 images which includes passing the 14,000 mark for screenshots and 19,000 for scans.

February 6, 2007 The database passes 34,000 images.

February 7, 2007 The RF Generation collection system is switched over to a mySQL based one which added features such as sorting by hardware or software in the stats, a software/hardware drop down menu as well as being able to view one's entire collection on one page. Besides the obvious user features it is also faster and will be easier to expand and make additions to in the future.

February 15, 2007 The number of game screenshots for the RFGeneration database passes 15,000.

March 4, 2007 Submissions System Version 3.0 is unveiled which adds many different features and optimizations. Most notably among them are the ability to input ESRB or world-wide equivalent, streamlined Media Formats for easier choices and uniformity, adding of alternate titles and adding of countries to games that may not have had a region wide release. Also 3.0 makes searching for listing in the database easier and searchable by country as well.

March 11, 2007 RF Generation passes 20,000 game scans.

March 27, 2007 RF Generation reaches the 1000 mark for hardware entries which includes systems, controllers, peripherals and other gaming equipment.

April 27, 2007 Staff members "Tynstar" and "Tan" finish merging the Atari XEGS section of the database with the newly re-named Atari 8-bit family (formerly Atari 400 Series) section.

May 1, 2007 The RF Generation database passes the 40,000 mark for images.

July 11, 2007 Several new game systems have been added with a total of 137 individual sections of the database. Also total scans have surpassed the 25,000 mark.

July 26, 2007 RF Generation's game database surpassing 30,000 entries.

October 2007 Scans in the database surpass 30,000.

October 2007 RF Generation begins cataloging downloadable games for the Xbox 360, PC, Wii and PlayStation 3 for a possible future database addition.

[edit] References

  1. ^ RF Generation: About page [1]

[edit] External links